The Purple Reign

Hi.

This year is turning into such an awful year, with so many celebrities passing away, including some who are big influences on me, and I'm sure a large number of people of my generation.

Rather than wax lyrical and repeat all of the information that you can find on Wikipedia, and all of those other places, I thought that I might look at this from a different angle...

Back in the nineties I was a bassist for a few bands.  One of the bands I was in, who at that time were named Jewel, but we split before the singer named Jewel came about, luckily for her ;-)

A lot of our material was made up of cover versions, which was a bit of a sore point for me back then, as I was always a very prolific writer.  Nowadays my opinion on cover versions has changed slightly.  Back then though I thought that we should have had more than six cover versions in our twenty four song set!  Yes, twenty four songs when we were the only group on the bill!  We did the set in two halves...

Now, by this time I was into the music of Prince.  I enjoyed a lot of his music when I was younger, but mainly from seeing videos on television, and hearing his music on the radio.  I thought that Purple Rain was a beautiful song, and liked When Doves Cry, Kiss, Raspberry Beret, and a good few others, and intended to get some of his music into my collection.

While I was working at the old Bandwagon Studios in Mansfield as an admin assistant, I made friends with everyone there, most of whom are still among my greatest friends.  The manager at the time, and again now, was Andy Dawson (an absolutely awesome guitarist), who I ended getting into a conversation with about Prince.  He suggested that I get hold of the New Power Generation albums, which I did, and I was automatically hooked from then on!

It feels bad that it took that long for it to happen, but there was something incredible about his music.

It was a style all of his own in a way, which was inspired by so very many genres, that it was unbelievable to even try and fathom where all of his influences originally came from!

Anyway, the other two members suggested that we do a Prince song as a cover version, and that I sing it...

I went away and learnt about twenty songs I think, I'm not sure - I'm getting on y'know! ;-)

So we were together again rehearsing and that, and I was there with songs such as Purple Rain, Little Red Corvette, and even Cream (I just wanted to learn it because it's so damn funky).  I'd learnt the lyrics and bass parts, as well as guitar for some of them.

The guys said that they were thinking of the song Controversy.  An incredibly high vocal range piece with my "get by" vocals.

We learnt it, played it a few times in sets, and just about got away with it.  It seemed to go down okay, just as the vocal melody also went down a little bit - same key, different pitch!

My love for Prince's music grew over the years, and I became very much a collector of his records, and someone who finds beauty in places where others don't even look...

The Rainbow Children is a wonderfully jazzy album.  3121 has some great gems on that people don't even think about - "Guitar" has some absolutely mind-blowing guitar work.

He's incredibly well known for his prolific nature, and he could play 27 instruments at the last count.  His ex-wife Mayte has said on occasion that he would suddenly have an idea, go into the recording studio at home in Paisley Park, and then come out of the studio an hour later having completely written and recorded the whole song complete.  According to one rumour, The Most Beautiful Girl In The World was written, recorded, and mixed in a hour and a half!  One and a half hours!  WOW!

When Prince wrote great songs, he wrote some absolutely incredible songs.

Rumours have been abound for years about there being an incredibly large vault of unreleased material that is stored at Paisley Park, and according to a documentary that I watched once, it is true that there is a wealth of material there, although whether it agrees with what people said in the late nineties that he had enough to release an album every year for fifty years without having to record another song, is debatable.

Whatever the truth behind the archive rumours, it is still a fact that he was wrote an amazing amount of material, and that there were three or four albums that he wanted to release in the period of a year between two albums that were released, that the record company said would be a bad idea!  That would have made five or six albums in the space of sixteen months apparently.  One of those albums did eventually get released a while later as The Black Album.

His music was the soundtrack to so many people's lives, and will continue to be played far into the future.  His influence is undeniable, and his ability was staggering.

His music wasn't easily available for a period of time, which had a lot to do with disputes with record companies over royalties and the rights for artists to own their own music, which actually led to him for many years releasing his material online through his website - people joined the website for a fee, and albums were issued to those members.  Eventually he went back into the corporate realm, but with an undisclosed contract that was no doubt an incredibly good one!

His profile rose again over the last couple of years, and he was once more starting to reach that great position known as "Iconic".

Over the coming years his legend will be mythologized, much like other artists are, but it doesn't detract from the point that he still made an impact on me and others.

He will be missed, but we will continue to play his music.

Rest in peace Prince Rogers Nelson.

April 21st 2016

PS - I thought I would try and record Purple Rain live at work on my travel guitar (that is in the car boot), with only my memory from almost twenty years ago performing it a few times.  I should have reminded myself of the lyrics first - https://soundcloud.com/projectmarv/purple-rain-cover